Review: Goodbye Solo

I’m not sure which quality of “Goodbye Solo” I appreciate more. It’s a beautifully mysterious movie the likes of which I’ve seldom seen outside of art houses specializing in Italian movies about characters that vanish into thin air. It is also a movie about a very likeable, down-to-earth guy who just wants a better life for himself and his stepdaughter.

Both of these qualities really struck a chord with me both times I’ve watched it. I can’t remember any other movie that satisfied me on these two disparate levels at the same time. It’s like a thinking man’s heart warmer.

The movie opens with two men in a taxi cab. They are mid-ride and mid-conversation. Cabbie Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane) is immediately endearing. He’s a young man who has that sort of look, that sort of laugh. The much older William (Red West) is his fare. He’s a sharp contrast, grizzled and bitter. Solo listens as William offers him a huge advance to be his dedicated driver.

And, on a designated day, William tells him he will earn that advance by taking him on a one way trip to a windy mountain observation point. It’s a request that Solo will spend the rest of the movie coming to terms with. He wonders why a man, even an old and bitter one such as William, would want to end it all.

Solo takes the money. Heck, he certainly needs it. But will he be able to help a man commit suicide?

The two develop a relationship out of that chance meeting in Solo’s cab. Solo will learn about William and his past, but the information doesn’t come easily. This isn’t a movie of long, revealing speeches. Solo learns about William in fragments, an odd gesture, a slip of the tongue, a photograph in a coat pocket.

This puts us in the tantalizing position of playing detective. We work along with Solo, trying to figure out what makes William tick. And just when we and Solo think we have him figured out, he throws a mean left hook and decks us.

We and William also get to know Solo – and what a delight that is. He’s an immigrant from Senegal, still a work of the American dream in progress. The most cherished person in his life is his young stepdaughter Alex (played engagingly by newcomer Diana Franco Galindo). Everything Solo does, he does with highest hopes for her. William is visibly warmed by seeing them together. These are the only times we see through his tough exterior.

The movie’s most charming moments are between Solo and Alex. In one casually natural scene, Solo arrives home exhausted and collapses on Alex’s bed as she finishes her homework. Later, she helps him study. His dream is to become a flight attendant for a small airline. We feel their closeness as she quizzes him on the proper procedure for an emergency landing.

The movie opens by dropping us into the middle of a conversation, challenging us to quickly catch up with its characters, and it ends with a scene that allows us to sit back and wonder what happened. Was Solo able to change William’s mind, somehow, in the end? We don’t know for sure.

It’s a great ending. And maybe, just maybe, we’re offered a clue when William has a perfect opportunity to say “Goodbye Solo” and does not.

“Goodbye Solo” is rated R for language. It will screen at the Grand Theatres on Thursday, Oct. 28 at 3:00 and 5:30 as part of the Cinema 100 series. Tickets are available at the door.

Review: 9500 Liberty

“9500 Liberty” is a landmark movie. Its makers sensed that their footage was too important to keep in the can. People needed to see it as soon as possible. So they began posting raw footage to YouTube and soliciting feedback. Their documentary became a piece of Internet age interactive moviemaking.

The movie takes a fly-on-the-wall approach to following events in Virginia’s Prince William County. Council members strive to pass anti-immigration law that would require police officers to question anyone they have “probable cause” to suspect as being an undocumented immigrant.

It would be a blank check authorizing racial profiling and leads to fierce battle lines being drawn. It will tear a town apart. It will provoke author John Grisham to write, “‘9500 Liberty’ makes it clear that when we, as a nation of immigrants, debate the immigration issue, we are defining our very identity as Americans.”

On one side are longtime citizens of the county, worried about everything from declining property values to fears and frustrations over hearing Spanish spoken in the corner store. On the other is the rapidly growing Hispanic population, mostly worried about earning wages and raising their families.

The movie offers a straight forward account, but it’s made riveting, moving, and maddening by its gallery of characters. “9500 Liberty” has everything, a chorus of angered citizens, a housing contractor with a unique approach to free speech, a terrifying villain, and the housewife who brought him to his knees.

During the council meetings, everyone with an opinion has a moment at the microphone. Most memorable is a man so filled with hatred that he trembles from his upper lip all the way down to his shoes. He’s balanced by young children sent to the microphone by their parents who are too upset – or too wise – to try to address the council in English.

The title is a street address: 9500 Liberty Street. The property is owned by home improvement contractor Gaudencio Fernandez and on it still stands one wall from a demolished house. The wall faces a busy street corner. Fernandez fills that “billboard” with his thoughts. As time goes by, he refills the wall with increasingly desperate thoughts.

The villain – and instigator of the legislation – is blogger and self-styled political activist Greg Letiecq. Like everyone in the movie, he is given plenty of freedom to express himself – and plenty of rope to tie a noose around his neck. He’s a man on a mission to rid his town of Hispanics and drunk with the power of seeing his words get thousands of hits.

Enter Elena Schlossberg, a stay-at-home mom with two young children and a computer. Feeling helpless in the face of Letiecq, she attends a blogger convention and is struck by a lightning bolt. She creates a blog of her own, an anti-Letiecq blog, and turns her kitchen table into an unlikely command post.

The movie capitalizes ingeniously on technology and the Internet. But the most fascinating moment feels like an old school plea for making use of whatever is at hand. Faced with Letiecq’s relentless blogging, Fernandez makes use of that wall and some paint to create something remarkable.

He had a big surface to write his thoughts and he had lots of traffic flowing past it. His “liberty wall” became perhaps the most powerful blog of all.

“9500 Liberty” has not been rated by the MPAA. It is appropriate for all ages and would be highly appropriate viewing for most school children. It will screen at the Grand Theatres on Thursday, Oct. 21 at 3:00 and 5:30 as part of the Cinema 100 series. Tickets are available at the door.

Review: Songcatcher

With every Cinema 100 series, there’s typically one movie that I’m the most excited to share with our audience. It’s usually a movie that has floated in and out of our planning meetings for years, but was never selected because it was little known. A board member would persist though until we finally included it.

Then, when I watch it on DVD to write up a review and program notes, I think, “Wow. Why wasn’t that movie more successful? It’s fantastic.” That happened a few series ago with “The Snow Walker” which turned out to be one of the most popular movies we’ve ever shown. I think “Songcatcher” will be this season’s surprise hit.

The story begins with Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer), a brilliant turn of the century musicologist, as she gets passed over for a university promotion. She’s a victim of the “good old boys club” with a male newcomer getting the advancement that she’d spent years earning. Providing salt, the dean seems oblivious to her disappointment and scolds her for questioning his reasoning.

She splits and travels to the Appalachian Mountains to spend time with her sister and to get over her anger and disappointment. But she gets more than she’d expected, far more. Her sister is a school teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. She has a pretty young assistant and, with a little encouragement, the young woman sings a ballad she’s known since childhood.

What Penleric quickly realizes is that she’s stumbled upon the find of a lifetime for someone of her occupation. This young woman – and soon she realizes many others in the isolated community – holds in her memory a priceless album of Scots-Irish ballads that have remained unchanged for over 200 years and are unlike anything she or her colleagues have ever heard.

She gets a chance to catalogue something unique and sets out to record every song she can coax into the air. She plans to assemble them into an annotated songbook that will hopefully bring her the recognition she has sought for so long. But this special world – as with all special worlds in storytelling – is really just a variation of the university she left behind, a place to learn lessons and to go through changes. The men of this world will once again thwart her progress.

Directed by Maggie Greenwald, the movie is a beautifully photographed portrait of a people and a place, effortlessly lyrical, even poetic. It reminded me of Jane Campion’s equally fine portrait of artists as young lovers, “Bright Star.” And Greenwald’s vision is both feminist and romantic to its core as well.

Penleric finds her romantic challenge – adversary at first, ally eventually – in the dark, bearded character of Tom Bledsoe (nicely played by Aidan Quinn). And just as with all great romantic challenges, he knows of both worlds, the mountains, the city, and provides her with just what she needs to leave the men of her past, in the past.

I watch lots of movies, but only occasionally do I see one that makes me want to sing its praises to everyone I meet. I was telling people at church, I was telling people at work, and I was telling family members to give “Songcatcher” a shot. It’s one of those rare finds that make me glad I watch lots of movies.

“Songcatcher” is rated PG-13 for sexual content and an intense scene of childbirth. It will screen at the Grand Theatres on Thursday, Oct. 14 at 3:00 and 5:30 as part of the Cinema 100 series. Tickets are available at the door.

Review: Sugar

Sugar has dreamed and worked his whole life for a chance to go to the United States – a land so perfect they make Cadillacs that can drive on water. He’s a young pitcher from the Dominican Republic who throws a sweet curveball. Unfortunately though, baseball is a game, he is told, where you only get one chance – and curveballs have a way of getting away from you.

“Sugar” follows young Sugar as he’s called up to spring training, taught enough English to get by, and told to work hard. A running joke is that the young players eat a lot of French toast because they don’t know how to order their preferred “eggs, sunny side up.” How Sugar finally gets his eggs with the help of a sympathetic waitress is typical of the many warm moments that fill movie.

It’s a sports movie, but not one that follows the usual clichés. It doesn’t build to a big climactic confrontation between Sugar and some evil, squinty-eyed power hitter. Its rhythms are much more gentle and unpredictable. And the only villain is harsh reality, so many pitchers, so few opportunities.

Because of this, “Sugar” is a very sweet, very likeable movie. Like that waitress, most people Sugar encounters on his journey want to help him and want him to succeed, and so do we. He’s played with infinite charm by first time actor Algenis Periz Soto and his intentions are so selfless. All he wants is a better life for his mom back home.

I watch a lot of movies and it comes as such a pleasure to find one with a story that doesn’t feel Hollywood-like. This instead feels like the natural, inevitable flowing forward of events that would grow out of this character while following this path. It has the feel of his catching a bus, but not knowing its destination. When he finds himself headed to Bridgeport, IA, he turns to a teammate and asks, “Where’s ee-ah?”

The greatest pleasures of “Sugar” are spending time with the well-meaning and helpful souls Sugar meets along the way.

While playing Class A ball in Bridgeport, he is lodged with a family that has long been housing young hopefuls for the local minor league team. Aging Earl and Helen Higgins and their pretty teenage daughter Anne have one duty, to keep a player safe, well fed, and his mind focused on the game.

They fail at the last part, but all benefit greatly as thoughts and feelings stray off topic. The scenes between Sugar and Anne are especially complex, troubling for her, confusing for him. And, perhaps, the finest scene in the movie is when Sugar says, “Sorry,” before embracing Earl, eyes sobbing.

Sugar seems a young man whose only hope is recording Ks, but the source of the movie’s ultimate hopefulness is its gradual uncovering of another talent, inherited from his late father. The story ends in New York City, as have so many stories of immigrants, not to mention of baseball. And it is there that he meets the next great father of his life.

So why is he named Sugar? He says it’s because he’s sweet with the ladies. He also claims it’s because he has a sweet knuckle-curve. One of his teammates quips it’s because he so loves dessert. All of these prove true, but the real truth is that he earns the nickname every day with everything he does.

And this movie truly earns its title as well.

“Sugar” is rated R for language, some sexuality and brief drug use.

Fall 2010 Series

Oct 7 - Sugar

Introspective sports drama concerning a talented Dominican baseball player who longs to break into the American big leagues and earn the money needed to support his impoverished family.

Oct 14 - Songcatcher

Doctor Lily Penleric, a brilliant musicologist, impulsively visits her sister, who runs a struggling rural school in Appalachia. There she stumbles upon the discovery of her life - a treasure trove of ancient Scots-Irish ballads.

Oct 21 - 9500 Liberty

A few years before Arizona passed its new immigration law, a similar law was passed and then repealed in Virginia's Prince William County. The documentary “9500 Liberty” tells the fascinating story of how that happened, and possibly foretells what lies ahead for Arizona.

Oct 28 - Goodbye Solo

Solo is a Senegalese cab driver working to provide a better life for his young family. William is a tough Southern good ol' boy with a lifetime of regrets. One man's American dream is just beginning, while the other's is quickly winding down.

Nov 4 - Exit through the Gift Shop

Billed as 'the world's first street art disaster movie' the film contains exclusive footage of Banksy, Shephard Fairey, Invader and many of the world's most infamous graffiti artists at work.

Winter's Bone

Article first published as Movie Review: Winter's Bone on Blogcritics.

There are scenes in Winter’s Bone that are downright harrowing. The movie poster features three women on a nocturnal canoe ride. That scene is the movie’s climax, so I won’t say much. But it’s strong stuff, not for the squeamish. Imagine Tobe Hooper remaking Deliverance and you’d be on the right track.

During that scene, I knew for sure that I was watching a terrific movie, although I already had little doubt. The movie has a wonderful sense of being lived in and having characters that’ve done plenty of living. And it makes terrific use of regional non-actors. There are two scenes in particular that feel like vibrant documentary.

Our heroine, Ree Dolly (a breakout role for Jennifer Lawrence) visits a home on her journey, but before she arrives we are invited in to hang out with the people as they play folk music while kicking back on a sofa. The music, the evocative faces, and the clutter of the room all combine to create something truly evocative.

Out of money and in desperate need of food, Ree gives her younger brother and sister a lesson in survival. It’s a perfectly honed sequence, a how-to guide to hunting, cleaning, cooking, and savoring squirrels. The looks of fascination, disgust, and hunger filling her sister’s eyes are its memorable centerpiece.

17-year-old Ree is down on her luck. Her dad is on the run from the law. It seems he’s made a life of nothing but bad decisions and cooking meth is his latest. If he doesn’t appear for his approaching court date, his family will lose their house. He used it as collateral on a bail bond.

Ree must find her loser of a dad and convince him to come out of hiding and become just a little bit less of a loser. It won’t be easy though. Her mom is hopelessly strung out on her dad’s stuff, her two younger siblings need her care, and her whole backwoods Ozark community is either protecting her dad or wanting to kill her just for being his daughter.

That’s the plot. And I’ll tell you right now that plot isn’t where it’s at with this movie. The plot feels mechanical like something trying to please the wrong people (also known as studio executives). This movie is all about beautifully capturing a place and the people who populate it.

Plot gets in the way here. All of the best moments are when plot stands still and the characters simply exist. The weakest moments are slaves to plot.

In an effort to fit in all of the archetypes that need to be present in a “good plot,” the movie suffers from too many characters. And the ending, feeling the need to create a sense of closure, feels just too neat and tidy for characters with still so much messiness in their lives.

American independent movies took a wrong turn back in the ‘90s. They were once fertile ground for alternative modes of storytelling and homes for subject matter too specialized for mainstream mass marketing. Now, they often feel like mainstream movies – on a low budget. It’s as if the filmmakers are saying, loudly, “Just imagine what I could do for you if you gave me some real money.”

I look at what neophyte director Debra Granik has done here and imagine not what she could’ve done with more money, but what she could do with the same if she’d forget about trying to cram a square peg of a plot into the midst of her wonderfully round characters.

By Brakhage: Anthology

Article first published as Blu-ray Review: By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes One and Two (The Criterion Collection) on Blogcritics.

THE FILMS

By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes One and Two is more than a Blu-ray set. It’s a national treasure. It’s something to watch once a year for the rest of one’s life. It’s certainly the home video release of the decade.

I first encountered Stan Brakhage, a force in experimental filmmaking for nearly 50 years, while a freshman in college. I wasn’t a film buff, yet. I was just a teenager taking an “Intro to Film” class for an easy grade.

One day, the professor sat us down and unspooled a documentary of open heart surgery that was so out of focus and filled with light leaks – as if the filmmaker had repeatedly opened the film magazine while shooting – that the film consisted solely of splotches of red (blood) and green (surgical gowns).

The professor proudly declared, “That was by Brakhage. We’ll talk tomorrow. Class dismissed.” I remember students stomping out like they’d been insulted. I couldn’t move.

The next morning I realized why the professor had been so brief. He wanted us to sleep on it. I awoke feeling like my brain had been removed, rewired, and plugged back in again. Brakhage aimed to create a cinema that forced his viewers to re-learn not only the ways of watching movies, but the very act of seeing with one’s own eyes.

I consider all 56 films on the set to be brilliant. Hell, I’ll just come out and admit that he’s my favorite filmmaker of all time and I cherish everything he made. I’ll single out a few though.

One could say that to be married to Brakhage made one, by default, part of his art. He was a man who didn’t discern any difference between his work, his art, and his life.

Because of this, many of his films are like imaginatively filmed home movies. Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959) transformed a honeymoon into a shadowy nightmare of uncertainty and lovemaking. The birth of a child became Window Water Baby Moving (1959), a film of home birthing like no other. His first wife Jane was nothing if not a trooper.

His magnum opus is Dog Star Man (1961-64). It begins slowly, taking over a minute to emerge from darkness to gradually fill the screen with explosions of imagery, some recognizable like solar flares and a man climbing a mountain carrying an axe, some indistinguishable. The film is an epic poem seen through a kaleidoscope.

23rd Psalm Branch (1967) is one of the angriest screams in the face of war’s horrors ever committed to celluloid. Made on 8mm film, this complex living, breathing, and shuddering cry from hell is the most riveting thing I’ve ever seen in the dark. (And make sure you watch all of these films in a very dark room. I tried watching them with the evening sun streaming in through the window and it rendered virtually all of the subtle imagery invisible.)

If forced to pick a favorite, I’d probably cheat and say “all of his hand-painted films.” He was a tactile filmmaker. He loved to apply paint, sometimes in streaks, sometimes in globs directly to film strips. And the results are like Jackson Pollock paintings in motion. OK, my favorite is Love Song (2001).

The paints that he used around the time of Dog Star Man proved fateful. The toxins were considered the source of the cancer that eventually killed him. You could say he literally painted his life into his masterpieces.

The set concludes with the final film he made, Chinese Series (2003), scratched directly into emulsion with his fingernails. Made from his hospital bed about a week before his death, it is one of his most simply beautiful works.

In this world of people who can’t wait to retire, he was a gem, somebody who passionately never stopped working.

THE TRANSFER

I’m not a technical connoisseur of video and audio quality, but I can say that the image on these Blu-ray discs is much richer, deeper, and more detailed and the colors are much more vibrant than on the DVD version I’ve owned since 2003. Re-watching films like Dog Star Man has been like seeing them anew.

I’m definitely happy that I sprang for the Blu-ray set even though it meant a “double dip” of the material on Volume One.

One bit of warning though to the uninitiated. None of the usual digital cleanup has been done to any of these films. Scratches, hairs, dust, fingerprints, and splices are visible everywhere and this is both intentional and appropriate.

I once saw a photo of a few feet of film from 23rd Psalm Branch and it was so rough looking that I’m surprised it could make it through a projector without flying apart in all directions.

As I mentioned earlier, Brakhage was very much a “hold the film in his hands and play with it” kind of filmmaker and these “flaws” are a side-effect of his working methods. Many, if not all, of them were embraced by Brakhage and became part of their film’s texture.

Much has been bemoaned already about the audio quality not getting the same loving attention on this release as the video. Apparently, the audio is still compressed on these discs and thus doesn’t take full advantage of the Blu-ray format. I say “apparently” because I’m taking other critics’ word for it.

To me, the soundtracks sound perfectly fine for what they are. None are anything approaching hi-fidelity to begin with and only eight out of the 56 films even have soundtracks. And one of those, Scenes from Under Childhood, Section One (1967-76), is optional and not even Brakhage’s preferred way of viewing the film.

THE BONUS MATERIALS

The riches to be found in this treasure trove don’t stop with the films. There’re many jewels here to help one better understand and appreciate the man’s work.

Most of the films from Volume One are preceded by spoken introductions by Brakhage. These act as great lead-ins lending the collection a quality similar to a fine literary anthology. They’re just brief tidbits that provide a bit of perspective, but not so much that they cloud your mind with preconceived ideas. Interpretation here is 90% of the fun.

Another fine bonus is a series of interview-like encounters with Brakhage that allow him more time to explain his ideas about filmmaking. These were recorded over a number of years and welcome new chapters are now included with Volume Two.

There are also a few segments of Brakhage speaking to unseen audiences at Sunday salons at the University of Colorado and an audio-only lecture with Brakhage discussing the profound influence of Gertrude Stein’s poem Stanzas in Meditation.

You might say, “Wow. That’s a lot of talk.” But, Brakhage was an endlessly fascinating speaker. I could listen to him for many hours beyond the hour or so included here. He’s like the college professor you always wished you had.

The remaining major bonus is a short and barely edited documentary of Brakhage at work, filmed by his second wife Marilyn. I wish the set included more footage of him at work. He comes across as a man so at one with his camera that it appears to have sprouted from his forehead.

Most bonus materials are enjoyable once – if at all – and then set aside never to be visited again. I’ve already been through all of these twice and plan to revisit them almost as often as the films.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Definitely give this set a go. The films are acquired tastes though so rent them or borrow them from a library if you’re hesitant. And don’t try to take in all 697 minutes at once. My suggestion is to watch just a few films at a time at night when it’s dark – and then go straight to bed and sleep on them.